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Table for Two: Foodspotting Joins the OpenTable Family

We just celebrated our birthday and over three delicious years of helping people find and share great dishes. Now we have something else to toast because we're joining forces with our friends at OpenTable, who have agreed to acquire Foodspotting!

When we founded Foodspotting, driven by our love of obscure dishes like okonomiyaki, Ted, Soraya and I set out to bring a dish-centric dining guide into the world and watch it grow. We raised some money, grew our team to ten (plus alum), and built a community that catalogued over three million dishes. Today, towards the same end, we're so happy to have found a great home for Foodspotting where our site, app, and community can continue to thrive while our entire team continues to focus on making your dining experiences awesome.

We’ve already been working closely with the OpenTable team as partners: In addition to making restaurant reservations via Foodspotting, you may have seen Foodspotting photos from select restaurants popping up on OpenTable. But we both realized we could create smarter experiences if we could integrate more deeply by, for example, recommending dishes when you make reservations to enabling restaurants to showcase their best dishes. We look forward to augmenting your dining experiences with Foodspotting’s recommendations to forge the shortest path between you and great food!

What does this mean for me?

Rest assured that Foodspotting will continue to live on as a standalone product, as OpenTable deeply values the Foodspotting community and your contributions. You’ll still be able to spot food anywhere in the world, from street food stalls to seven course meals. But you can also look forward to smarter recommendations, better restaurant information and a more visual, social and design-driven dining experience as we bring the best of Foodspotting to OpenTable.

We hope you’ll celebrate with us as we reimagine dining with OpenTable. We’d love to hear what you’d like to see us create together, and look forward to making it happen!

I'm with Emily. That's great for Foodspotting, and great for Open Table, but not so great for the photographers. They should at least link back to our websites like Pinterest. I am taking my photos down.

I'm also worried about the continued fate of apps on platforms that are not iPhone or Android. Will it be updated more often now or will it be left to rot ?
Open Table also limit themselves to their client restaurants so the service is not available in all countries, unlike Foodspotting. Will Foodspotting become American-centric and leave the rest of the world as later thoughts ?